Shaking my head, I refused. The Prince glared at me, offended. The fowl shook its scoriaceous dewlaps. I remembered the fate of Pedro. I took the Prince’s place on the throne and he said: “Long-awaited Lord: you have given us back the sun. We thank you.”
Instead of asking and wasting a question, I stated: “The sun rises every day.”
The Prince sadly shook his head, and in a loud voice repeated my words to the throng at the foot of the temple. When they heard him, they wailed and shouted no, no, not so; the noise of the drums and rattles rose and with satisfaction the Fat Prince looked at his people and then at me.
“It rises for you, our Lord, when you wish it. But for us it dies. We have seen the deaths of many suns; and when the suns die, the deep rivers of our land dry up, nothing grows upon the land, animals die and princes die; the birds die. Cities return to rough stone and disappear beneath the jungle growth. We have died, and fled, and we have returned when you have deigned to return the sun to us. The sun does not die for you, for you are its master. For us it dies every night, and we never know whether it will rise again. You have proved who you are. We sacrificed you in exchange for the sun, and you returned the sun to us, and with it you returned to earth. We do you honor, Lord, on this day of the Water.”
The Fat Prince raised his fan of feathers and signaled to two young men, who rapidly climbed the temple steps. In their hands they carried two small cloth-covered earthen jars. The Prince dropped his fan and accepted the jars, holding one in each hand. He said to me: “Uncover them.”
I did, and I must tell you, Sire, those jars contained excrement, vile excrement, and with a gesture of repugnance I re-covered the jars as the obese Prince spoke: “Offer this to the bird, who is the bejeweled guaxolotl, and you will be rewarded, for this bird is the prince of the world.”
I arose from the throne and held out the two filthy jars to that fowl he called guaxolotl; the fowl shook its dewlaps and with its own beak lifted the cotton cloth that lay over the shrine and revealed to my eyes a treasure of jewels of gold and polished jade.
“See, my Lord,” murmured the Fat Prince, “the jeweled bird offers you the gold and jade, the excrement of the gods, in exchange for human excrement. With it he offers power, riches, and glory. Take it all. It is yours.”
What misery. I had before me riches enough to found an empire; but I had possessed the glory of the pearls on the beach where I had been shipwrecked, and I had received the power of gold from the natives beside the river; but I had abandoned both glorious pearls and powerful gold, I had forgotten them amid the rain and mud and mosquitoes, for I had found they could not help me survive in this land. What the obese Prince called the excrement of the gods, would it serve me in any way?
The temptation of this treasure which the fowl guarded was nothing compared to the greatest temptation of my new life: the Lady of the Butterflies, finding her again, making love to her again. And to that end my only treasure was a simple spider’s thread of greater worth than all the jade and topaz and emeralds and gold and silver I was offered in appreciation for the return of the sun. To follow the road to the volcano I must travel without any burden. And so I replied to the Fat Prince: “I accept your offering, my Prince. And having accepted, I return it to you in exchange for one question.”
The Prince looked confused, and I continued: “Tell me what I ask of you, for if you know the answer you will know how to defend yourself, and if you do not know, you will be forewarned. I look at your people and I fear that my passage among you may be as disastrous as my time with the people beside the river. Answer this single question, for I know that I may obtain only one answer on this day. Tell me: why were all the people killed who lived beside the river?”
The Fat Prince trembled: “Is my answer worth all the riches, the power, and the glory the jeweled bird-prince offers you?”
I said yes; perturbed, he answered: “They were not killed. They killed themselves. By their own hand they offered themselves in sacrifice.”
I bowed my head, as perturbed by this answer as the man who gave it. At my feet, beckoning, lay the spider’s thread.
As I left this land, walking across the white plain away from the temple and the well and the people who wished one night to sacrifice me and the next day to honor me, I pondered greatly the answer of the obese Prince. I could still hear the sad lament of their flutes, and their disappointed faces as they watched me leave were still alive in my memory. But above all else, to my feverish imaginings came the spectacle of the people beside the river.
A people immolated by its own hand. So that killing had not been a reprisal on the part of the men of the mountain but a voluntary sacrifice motivated by some other reason: perhaps the death of their Lord of Memory, and with him the death of memory itself? Did they fear their orphaned state, bereft of the knowledge demanded by that place: the sun and rain, the time to collect firewood and the time to burn it, smoke and gold, flight to the hill, the return to the river? They were a fragile, tender people too preoccupied with combating the evil of nature ever to practice human evil.
I loved that people in my memory, Sire, for as one who also lived without memory, I felt I was one of them. And I pardoned them the death of my old friend Pedro, for I understood that his intrusion, as mine, had interrupted the sacred order of things and ages; they did not hate us, they feared our presence would break the perfect cycles of an age that defended them against the evil of nature. The new world was a world of fear, of fleeting happiness and constant anguish: I trembled to think how our measures of duration and of strength, of survival and defeat and triumph, were useless here where everything was born each day only to perish again each night; I trembled to think of an encounter between our energetic concepts of continuity with these that were but a quickly withered flower of a day — uncertain expectation. I pardoned, I say, Pedro’s death. I told myself I would also pardon them mine. The intrusion of one white man in these lands was enough … no, it was too much.
Night surprised me in the midst of these cavilings, guided always by the spider’s thread. I had passed the chalky plain and was traveling a road that penetrated into a forest of tall trees covered with clusters of crescent-shaped green fruit. I also noted that the road, more arduous now, ran uphill. I was leaving rivers and jungle and sea behind. I felt hungry, and I shook one of those trees to satisfy that hunger. I was just preparing to eat when I heard the sound of someone working. I tried to identify the sound and came to the conclusion that a short distance from me someone was cutting wood. I entered deeper into the dark woods with several of the green fruit in my hand, ready to share them with the woodcutter.
In the darkness I could barely make out the stooped figure of a man standing with his back turned to me, violently attacking a tree trunk with an ax. Confidently, I approached. The man turned to face me and I cried out in horror, for the woodcutter’s face was nothing but two glowing eyes and a swinging tongue that hung from a slit of a mouth, a smooth lipless wound; and the rib cage of this phantom opened and closed like gates in the wind, and as his ribs parted they revealed a living, beating heart that glowed like the monster’s eyes. I was sure I had lost my reason, such was the contrast between my feeling of peaceful friendship and the horror of the vision: then the enormous hanging tongue spoke imperiously: “Dare … Take my heart, take it in your hand, dare to do what no one else has ever dared…”
Oh, Sire, as you hear me, recall, and sum up my adventures from the time I left your shores and tell me why upon hearing these words I would hesitate: what was seizing that palpitating heart compared to the dangers I had met in the sea, in the center of the vortex, among the warriors on the beach, and in the sacrifice of the well?